Distance Quotations

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light.

Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports. It's ironic because millions of people who swim as their regular exercise love the meditation aspect of it; you don't wind up with any orthopedic injuries. But when you swim at a world class level for hours and hours - the loneness of the long distance runner.

When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

A perfect run has nothing to do with distance. It's when your stride feels comfortable. You're on your toes trying to push it. Suddenly you realize you can open it up a bit more. You know you're at one with yourself and the environment. You're a little more alive than before you started.

The last couple relationships I had were long distance. It's not like I can make much of an effort to travel and see anybody. The guy had to do all the work, unfortunately.

The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western - just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel, and the way things develop sort of slowly - it's almost the antithetical of what's currently going on in the movies, you know.

The most sinister aspect of Jack is his detachment, his ability to distance himself from his feelings.

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, but it sure heats up the blood.

Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile.

Scarce any problem will appear more hard and difficult, than that of determining the distance of the Sun from the Earth very near the truth: but even this... will without much labour be effected.

I maintain my sanity by keeping my distance.

There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it's better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don't know very well.

We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Shoot, after you've been through freeway traffic in Houston or Dallas, there's no road in the world that can scare you. Besides, we're pretty much used to driving long distances in Texas.

Actually, the curious thing is that the more you become a subject of admiration or loathing, the more you're examined under a microscope, the distance seems to open up between who you really are and the portrayals that people impose on you.

For the cause that lacks assistance, The wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that I can do.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.

Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

We have said that Israel has had a very bad history with the United Nations, and whoever cares for himself in Israel distances himself from that Organization.

It's hard for two actors to be together. Take the traveling, for instance. It winds up being a long distance relationship, all the time, because one's working here and one's working there, or one's staying at home and one's off someplace else.

Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, and robes the mountain in its azure hue.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.

We live in this thought web; we identify things and put them away and distance ourselves from them. But to be completely present? That is source, that is art, that is spirituality. And meditation is a way to defy fear and experience that source.

It's nice to have some distance with your family. As long as you're closer to them by love.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Men at a distance, who have admired our systems of government unfounded in nature, are apt to accuse the rulers, and say that taxes have been assessed too high and collected too rigidly.

No doubt it is true that science cannot study God, but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything that scientists want to study.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

The blackness of space was a big shock to me. It is a deep, three-dimensional, oily blackness. You can feel the distance.

To be consistently effective, you must put a certain distance between yourself and what happens to you on the golf course. This is not indifference, it's detachment.

Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

Horses know how to be loyal but still keep their distance.

Upon the whole it was a Glorious day-Our men are in the Spirits-and I am confident we shall give them a total defeat the next Action; which is at no great distance.

About once a year, I do these long-distance relays with some friends of mine, and it takes about 27 or 28 hours to complete it.

From a building right in front of my windows, I can observe the speed of the sunrises and sunsets. The voices of children playing, laughing, yelling, and crying on the playground crawl up to the eighth floor, where I write. Their voices sound so innocent from a distance.

I don't see my movies. I think it's healthier and safer to keep a bit of distance. I'm afraid to be disappointed.

The number of medals on an officer's breast varies in inverse proportion to the square of the distance of his duty from the front line.

Life is fragile: it thrives only in a narrow range of temperatures between freezing and boiling. How lucky that our planet is just the right distance from the sun: a little farther, and the death of the perpetual Antarctic winter - or worse - would prevail; a little closer, and the surface would truly fry anything that touched it.

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance.

We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.

Obviously, a long-distance relationship is hard. But, like anything worth having, you make it work.

A landline is an anchor - busy signals, long distance bills, missed connections and all.

The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.

Liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.

Intensity like signal strength will generally fall off with distance from the source, although it also depends on the local conditions and the pathway from the source to the point.

I dont think ignorance is a way that you gain distance on something.

I am never out there just jogging for the heck of it. I never do that. I start to run with a goal in mind, whether it's a certain time or certain distance or a specific heart-rate goal, and then I am done.

I come from Montana, and in eastern Montana we have a lot of dirt between light bulbs. It is expensive trying to bring the new technologies to smaller schools to upgrade their technologies to take advantage of distance learning.

As much as I love and respect my brother, I'm doing my best to distance myself from him and kind of show people that, even though we do look similar and have similar mannerisms, we are completely different.

I guess I am basically most comfortable when I'm alone. As a kid, I was very much a loner. I love long distance running and long distance biking. A director once pointed out that those are all very isolated exercises you do for hours at a time.

I think I came up in fighting in a really technical way. If you've ever seen my fights, you know I love distance, I love technique.

I used to date Kellan Lutz. We were together for two and a half years, but the distance and travel really kept us apart. In the end we decided it wouldn't work, but we're still good friends.

It is very possible that I could have ended up on 80 acres of land by myself, and fallen in love at a distance with a gorgeous woman I could never have been with.

Most centrist Democrats... try to distance themselves from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy.

I've been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realisations how little we are, how far we are from everything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust?

One minute we can be in a small club, the next minute we can be in a coliseum, and the next minute we can be in a small auditorium. It varies, depending on the promoter, the budget, and the travelling distance.

When I was younger I probably didn't understand something basic about tact, but I think it kept faint-hearted people at arm's distance and that's not such a bad thing, because life is short and I know the kind of people I want to work with.

I've gradually gained more confidence swimming for distance in the open sea, but I still return to the rock pools.

We talk about heaven being so far away. It is within speaking distance to those who belong there. Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.

The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.

The car is not a rabbit or a deer that jumps around in sweeping lines, but it is a man-made work of technology in need of an appropriate roadway. Rather, the car resembles a dragon fly or any other jumping animal that moves shorter distances in straight lines and then changes its direction at different points.

When you run the marathon, you run against the distance, not against the other runners and not against the time.

Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior.

Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement.

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

Distance is a bad excuse for not having a good relationship with somebody. It's the determination to keep it going or let it fall by the wayside; that's the real reason that the relationships continue.

My own reaction from a distance is that Pol Pot's demise as the leader of the Khmer Rouge was inevitable, and that his own paranoia did him in as much as anything else.

There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.

Part of why I started a band was due to feelings of shyness and social ineptitude. I saw it as some way of being able to interact with people from a safe distance.

Breaking up is just hard, even if you're the one breaking up. It's not fun. It can be dramatic and complicated. And then you get a little distance and you think, why did it have to be so complicated and dramatic?

The same technologies enabling us to work together at a distance are creating the expectation to do better at governing ourselves.

Every relationship I've been in becomes long-distance because of work. It's never worked out. It puts an intense strain on the relationship, and at a certain point, it becomes too difficult.

The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.

I grew up in Birmingham, but my parents are originally from Barbados. My dad, Romeo, was a long-distance lorry driver, and my mother, Mayleen, worked in catering.

My guess is many top athletes, distance runners included, use performance-enhancing drugs, enough so that the problem must be tackled.

I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.

Sorrows are like thunderclouds, in the distance they look black, over our heads scarcely gray.

Women have talent and intelligence but, due to social constraints and prejudices, it is still a long distance away from the goal of gender equality.

I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.

Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.

Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well.

'The Good, the Bad, the Weird' is about individuals fulfilling their desires and just going the distance to fulfill that desire.